Spanierman Gallery is pleased to announce Art for the New Collector II: Re-Emerging American Artists, an exhibition and sale of paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture. The ninety-nine works are primarily by American artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although there are also examples by a few contemporary artists. Many of the artists included are rediscoveries. During their own eras, they rose to prominence and advanced the important aesthetic trajectories of their day, but as time passed, they were forgotten. In the recent decades, as scholarship on American art has deepened and broadened our knowledge, we have again become aware of these artists and their significance. Hence, we are able to appreciate their art anew, seeing it in its historical context and for its individual freshness, strength, and appeal.

The artists represented include Johann Berthelsen, Emil Bisttram, Abraham J. Bogdanove, Howard Russell Butler, Arthur B. Carles, William Clapp, Bruce Crane, James Daugherty, Arthur B. Davies, Arthur Clifton Goodwin, Aaron Harry Gorson, Emile Gruppe, Charles Salis Kaelin, Walt Kuhn, Myron Lechay, Hayley Lever, Peter Moran, John Francis Murphy, Violet Oakley, George F. Of, Clara Greenleaf Perry, Tunis Ponsen, Henry Prellwitz, Henry Ward Ranger, Ben Shahn, Edith White, John Whorf, and Mabel May Woodward. A sixty-four page catalogue with eighty-six color plates and artist-biographies, accompanying the show, is available from the gallery ($25 postpaid).

The works in the exhibition range in date from the sparkling images of Mt. Shasta and Crater Lake created by the Northwest-based painter James Everett Stuart in the 1880s to contemporary works by the watercolorist and chronicler of the American West, William Matthews, a crisp watercolor of a home in Stonington, Connecticut, in the tradition of Andrew Wyeth by Peter Poskas III, and bronzes by the skilled animaliers Dan Ostermiller and Kent Ullberg. The majority of the images, however, date from the end of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth. This was a rich period in our heritage when American artists capitalized on the vivacity and versatility of Impressionist techniques, which they modified and combined with a myriad of personal and modernist-inspired approaches.

Edith White, one of the finest professional women artists in southern California at the turn of the twentieth century, used vibrant Impressionist dabs to capture a quintessential American garden in which abundant wildflowers fill a plot that borders on a dense woods. While the Australian-born American émigré, Hayley Lever took his cue from Impressionist modes as well, he also incorporated the more richly expressive brush handling of Vincent van Gogh, as may be observed in a lush mountainous scene that probably depicts Woodstock, New York; here a dynamic application of vibrant color animates the surface with rhythmic harmony.

The longing for serenity in an era of urban expansion and modernization was given expression by a plethora of native artists. In an image of the coast at Ogunquit, Maine (ca. 1920), Mabel May Woodward created a minimalist composition evoking a sense of calm; here sailboats are pulled by a gentle breeze while the cool blue-turquoise water is complemented by the sun-bleached peach and yellow of a rocky outcropping. The Danish-born painter Johann Berthelsen also captured a mood of quietude in his scenes of New York enveloped by snow. His approach is typified in Snowfall in New York City, Grace Church, Flags Flying (ca. 1940s), in which the hard edges of buildings are softened and pedestrians and patriotic flags create coloristic accents in the snow-filled atmospheric haze.

The many directions of American art in the 1930s and 1940s are highlighted in this exhibition. The Social Realist movement is represented by Ben Shahn’s A Family Group (ca. 1940s-50s), an ink and ink wash drawing of an immigrant family gathered for a picnic, in which the artist imbued his subjects with dignity through his sympathetic and observant portrayal. The spiritualist dimension in nonobjective painting is exemplified in Emil Bisttram’s Abstraction (1936), a work in which cryptic geometric forms evoke ancient hieroglyphs as well as mechanized machine parts. A unique synthesis of American Regionalism and abstract painting was achieved by Glen Mitchell, as demonstrated in images such as Interlocking Natural Forms, Mexico (ca. 1937-1940s), a watercolor in which overlapping and translucent planes of space capture the artist’s wonder at the striking natural beauty of the Mexican countryside.

The exhibition demonstrates that despite the ever-growing popularity of American art, there are still many distinctive and compelling works by native artists that are available as well as affordable. We are glad to introduce these to new collectors as well as to those seeking to fill gaps in their existing collections.